JERUSALEM — Before he was taken hostage on Oct. 7, during the Hamas-led massacre at the Nova music festival, Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin thrived in a Jerusalem refuge where Israeli Jews and occupied Palestinians escape from reality and engage freely as equals. Since then, the community at the bar, Sira, has been transformed by an unending war that took one of their own, and the rough and pale limestone walls of the cavernous 19th-century bar have filled with despair.
Set to be released in the initial stage of a U.S. proposed cease-fire deal — an effort to end a war that has so far killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis — Goldberg-Polin and five other Israeli captives were found dead in Gaza on Sept. 1.
The next day, thousands of people lined the streets of Jerusalem during his funeral to mourn his loss. As crowds in the streets dissipated, friends of Goldberg-Polin from the fan club of his soccer team, Hapoel Jerusalem, gathered at Sira, a home for fans of a team representing a stark contrast to the forces that shape their city. Under a setting sun, people in their twenties who had come to Sira since Golberg-Polin’s abduction, determined to see him again, dawned black polo shirts with the fan club’s name, Malcha Brigade, stitched on the front, and let go of their last shreds of hope. They toasted to “Hersh” in a place he had been a regular face since he was 18, and came to terms with the fact that they would never celebrate life together again.
“Everyone is empty,” says Mor Maman, 21, a bartender at Sira and a Malcha Brigade friend of Golberg-Polin, who cheered alongside him at soccer games and drank with him at the bar.
The Israeli military says Hamas guards executed the six captives, including Goldberg-Polin, as their troops closed in. In the wake of the discovery, Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida released a statement saying the guards of hostages were issued new orders following Israel’s June hostage-rescue raid on Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. That assault killed more than 270 Palestinians and wounded nearly 700 others while freeing four Israeli captives. The reference to new orders suggests a policy of executing hostages rather than allowing them to be freed by the Israeli military.
With three of the six killed hostages set to be released in a first phase of the U.S. cease-fire proposal, anger from the hostages’ families and wide swaths of Israeli society is being directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is perceived to be sacrificing Israelis for political interests in continuing the war. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have joined rallies across the country since the killings, and Israel’s main labor federation called the country’s first general strike over matters of war. Israelis of all ages are blocking highways and clashing with police, as mass opposition to Netanyahu in the streets picks up where the pre-war protests against his government’s attempt to transform the judiciary left off.
Under immense public and international pressure, Netanyahu has doubled down on his demand to maintain control of Gaza’s Egypt border, which Israel left in 2005 and seized again in May, as a condition for a cease-fire. In an English press conference on Sept. 4, he alluded to the return of direct Israeli rule in the besieged coastal strip. When pressed, he declared that he thought it “unrealistic” for Israeli settlers to return to Gaza. His demand to keep control of the border area that Israel calls the Philadelphi corridor, however, is seen by Hamas, which demands a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as a nonstarter intended to scuttle any deal.
In a black military cap, black T-shirt, and black shorts, both a sign of mourning and uniform attire in a place where the aesthetic ranges from punk to hipster, Lior Gootriman, Sira’s 50-year-old owner, sits in front of his bar on a patio crowded with people chatting in Hebrew and Arabic, at tables plastered with images of Goldberg-Polin and calls for him to stay strong. His graying beard and somber look reflect off his pint glass. He says only President Joe Biden can effectively pressure the Israeli government to save the remaining hostages. Yet, he sees no evidence of that happening and has lost hope.
“We will find them dead because [Netanyahu] doesn’t want a deal,” Gootriman says with a sense of dread about those still held in Gaza. He believes Israel’s prime minister is continuing the war in a bid to cling to power. Netanyahu’s support plummeted in the fallout from Oct. 7, with many Israelis holding him responsible for Israel’s worst security failure in the country’s history. Gootriman blames Netanyahu for not having freed 23-year-old Goldberg-Polin, who, he says, considered working at his bar after finishing his conscripted army service, but instead decided on a year of traveling and partying — an Israeli post-army right of passage that’s as much about escape as experience.
Just hours before Goldberg-Polin went with friends to the Nova festival, right near the besieged Gaza Strip’s border, the young man — who hours later would become an international face of Israel’s hostages — was in Jerusalem, at Sira, beginning a long night of revelry.
“I remember he showed up in a car with two jugs of water, a backpack, and everything you need to dance,” Maman says about seeing Goldberg-Polin just before he left for the Nova festival. “We had some drinks, and then they left.”
It would be the last he saw of his friend before Hamas — the Islamic Palestinian nationalist movement that fought five previous wars with Israel during its 17-year rule in Gaza and is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the E.U. — stunned and terrified Israelis in a bloody surprise attack in the country’s south, killing 1,139 civilians and soldiers while taking another 251 captive. For Goldberg-Polin, the stop at Sira was a blissful prelude to his arm being blown off in the Nova massacre and a horrifying 11 months in captivity. His killing coldly ended nearly a year of hope for a life that people at Sira and Israelis in the streets believe could have been saved with a deal.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group living in Tel Aviv, describes the issue of Israel’s captives as cutting to the core of how Israelis see their country’s responsibility to its citizens and Jewish values that prioritize saving life above all else. “It has nothing to do with Palestinian suffering — it has to do with how they understand Israel’s national-security interests,” she says.
That is the message at the mass rallies in Tel Aviv, where the people clogging streets unscarred after nearly a year of war ignore the deaths, starvation, and diseases caused by their military’s wrecking of Gaza.
Pointing to polls showing that most Israelis support a cease-fire for a hostage deal, Zonszein sees these protests as the crystallization of an Israeli divide defined by the Netanyahu era. The tensions between the secular coastal economic establishment and the religious nationalists leading Israeli conquest of the occupied Palestinian territories erupted in the streets in the wake of Netanyahu’s 2023 return to power at the helm of the furthest right-wing, most settler-dominated cabinet in the country’s history. “This is the latest issue in what I would call the divide between [Israel’s] military establishment and political establishment,” says Zonszein, from a city where mass rallies demanding the government make a deal to release the hostages and for Netanyahu to call an election has become an end of Shabbat ritual.
On Tel Aviv’s frantic streets, where desperation is boiling over, reservists back from Gaza march alongside friends and families of captives, demanding their government do politically what they can’t do militarily: free the captives in Gaza. From roadblocks on the main highway through Tel Aviv, where police use water cannons on protesters, to the stages of mass rallies, the green T-shirts from the reservist organization Brothers in Arms have become synonymous with Netanyahu’s opposition in the streets. At the height of the protests against judicial reform just before the war, they began refusing to report for duty.
However, because this is a time of war, Gilad Bar-On, a spokesman for the organization, says that isn’t even a threat now. For his organization, the struggle with the government is over how to save Israelis, not how Israel is fighting its war or the cost for Palestinians. “We are not asking for a cease-fire, we are asking for a hostage deal,” says Bar-On. “We will accept a cease-fire.”
GOLDBERG-POLIN BECAME one of the most recognizable faces of the Oct. 7 hostages in Israel and the United States. His parents, who moved to Jerusalem from California when he was a child, have become leaders in a campaign for a hostage deal — taking to the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month to advocate for an immediate agreement.
“You promoted justice and peace in a way only a young, pure, wide-eyed idealist can,” Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, said at his funeral in the ancient, divided, and occupied Israeli capital.
At Sira, just shy of the now invisible pre-1967 war borderline that separated West Jerusalem from its post-war occupied east, Hebrew, Arabic, and English graffiti is scrawled on the walls between anti-fascist stickers and those of Hapoel — emblemized with cartoon images of Karl Marx. At one of Jerusalem’s only spots where Palestinians from the occupied east drink and smoke weed with Israelis who see and treat them as equals, friends describe Goldberg-Polin as at home in the free and open community. A stone’s throw from the old city, which has been walled in since the biblical age, the traditional punk bar named after the street it’s on cycles through a playlist of classic punk, ska, and New Wave, alongside hip-hop, local post-rock, and whatever else the bartender on shift is feeling.
The bar has long embodied the sense of justice that Goldberg-Polin’s mother spoke of in her son. It stands in contrast to Jerusalem’s religiously conservative, militarized, and bitterly unequal reality: a city that, like the settlement councils administering occupied land in the West Bank, decided not to join the short-lived Sept. 3 general strike.
As if to declare itself the immovable capital of another Jerusalem, Sira is just next door to the former home of Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose brand of Jewish nationalism was influenced by Italian fascism — and whose essay, “The Iron Wall,” is eluded to in Israel’s operational name for its Gaza War, Swords of Iron. While Sira’s fans of Hapoel, whose team name means “the Worker,” have been known to bring pictures of killed and jailed Palestinian kids to games in protest, the bar’s historic neighbor is associated with their biggest rival team, Beitar Jerusalem, whose fans are known to chant “Death to Arabs.”
“Hersh didn’t like the occupation,” Maman says, describing how Goldberg-Polin believed in equality between Israelis and Palestinians. In an opinion piece in Israel’s newspaper of record, Haaretz, after Goldberg-Polin’s killing, the Palestinian journalist from Jerusalem, Yanal Jabarin, eulogized his comrade from the soccer stadium who was committed to Palestinian rights and freedom. “The thing that I will remember most about him,” Jabarin wrote on Sept. 1, “is a picture that circulated among us fans of a sign that hung in his room that read ‘Jerusalem for all.’”
Maman says that despite serving as a medic in the army’s tank division, Goldberg-Polin wanted Israel’s 57-year military rule over Palestinians and the settling of their land to end, and got the fan club involved in projects to support young Palestinians. He was, Maman says, committed to fighting injustice and poverty, values that connected him with Hapoel’s culture and the environment at Sira.
A tank operator during his military service, Maman recalls turning to Goldberg-Polin for advice on how to get out of duty when it became too much for him. Having recently finished his service in the same division, Golberg-Polin, he says, told him how to navigate the command and what he needed to do to get out. “He really helped me get free from the army.”
In the wake of Goldberg-Polin’s abduction, however, Maman initially went back to his tank as a reservist and fought to push fighters from Gaza out of southern Israeli towns and Kibbutzim in the first days of the war. Though he opposes Israel’s occupation, he says, he initially supported the war, horrified and personally hit by loss. That changed when he lost friends fighting in Gaza in December, and he started to question what Israel is actually fighting to achieve. “It’s Bibi’s idea,” laments Maman. “Why do people need to fucking die?” Increasingly appalled by Israel’s smashing of Gaza and the devastation it has caused to Palestinians, he got himself discharged from the army.
Leading an Israeli organization of soldiers and ex-soldiers committed to having a public discussion about what the army does to maintain its occupation and fight wars, Nadav Weiman, executive director of Breaking the Silence, lives in the void between what Israelis see and do when they serve and what they discuss as a society. After 11 months of fighting, soldiers in Gaza are telling him about war fatigue and not trusting Netanyahu’s decisions. They say their duties have largely switched from an invasion force to an occupation force. “Maybe we’re trying to reoccupy Gaza to settle it,” he says, countering Netanyahu’s Sept. 4 claim and contending it’s his actual goal rather than Israel’s stated goals of destroying Hamas and returning the captives. “They have static posts, and they are doing patrols.”
Wienman says soldiers tell him they don’t believe their mission is to save hostages or destroy Hamas but rather manage control, like they did in the days of directly occupying Gaza: “[It’s] just like before disengagement in 2005.”
More chilling, however, Breaking the Silence has also been gathering testimonies from soldiers in Gaza that depict Israeli forces systematically using unrestrained violence and destruction in a war that forces Gaza’s Palestinians to endure dispossession and destitution on an unprecedented scale. Detailing the accounts, Weiman describes the systematic burning of Palestinian homes and use of civilians as human shields.
“We use a lot of landmines to blow up houses, and bulldozers cannot be everywhere all the time,” says Weiman about the rationale given by the soldiers. “So then the command comes to start burning houses,” he continues, describing the use of methods like pouring olive oil from the kitchen on a blanket and lighting it, or setting their books ablaze.
He highlights testimonies of soldiers having orders to fire on all men of a loosely defined military age, a policy that treats civilians as combatants. There are standing orders giving tanks permission to fire at a fleeting shadow in a window, he says, yet it’s a side of the war that doesn’t spark Israeli outcry. Nor does the evidence of rape, torture and starvation against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli black-site prisons like Sde Teiman, despite being national and international news. Weiman points to a single day of mass carnage as the reason: “It’s because of Oct. 7.”
The Oct. 7 attacks, the loss of Goldberg-Polin, and a Gaza war where Israel’s actions have it charged with committing genocide at the International Court of Justice have limited the sense of possibility at Sira, a place that’s been a glimpse of equality thriving just blocks from an occupation where Israeli settlers take over Palestinian homes.
“We are doing anything we can to save this place,” says Maman, describing the struggle to hold onto the idea of Sira amid the horror and polarization of the war. For him, the way to remember Goldberg-Polin is to keep fighting for the world he stood for, and keeping those values alive in the bar. “This is really the only left and anti-fascist place in the city.”
Gootriman doesn’t see his bar as a left-wing institution, but does acknowledge that the context of being in Jerusalem makes it seem that way. Despite embracing the socialist roots of the team he loves and the culture in his bar, for him, Sira is just a place where people are free to express themselves and are treated with respect regardless of nationality or politics. “I don’t care what you think as long as you act respectfully,” he says.
Before the war, stickers and posters with Palestinian flags condemning Israel’s decades-long occupation and segregated rule donned the walls and bathroom stalls, with calls to refuse military service scrawled over the edges. They are absent now. It’s a change Gootriman acknowledges is in line with his own sentiments. While he believes Netanyahu particularly, and the Israeli right generally, created the conditions for this war by sabotaging any chance of reaching a political resolution with Palestinians that ends Israel’s occupation in exchange for peace, sympathy for the Palestinians’ struggle or even the suffering they endure in Gaza is absent. Describing witness accounts of rape and murder at the Nova festival he has heard, he stops and stares blankly into the distance.
“After what happened,” says Gootriman, returning his attention to a question about the shattered reality Palestinians in Gaza now live in, “I don’t have any compassion.”
